Chinese anti-corruption activists go on trial

AFP, BEIJING

Two Chinese anti-corruption activists went on trial under heavy security yesterday, in Beijing’s latest strike against a burgeoning rights movement.

Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜) and Li Wei (李蔚) appeared at a court in Beijing’s Haidian District, their lawyers said. Scores of uniformed and plain-clothes police were deployed in various locations around the building, with at least 20 police vehicles.

Both men are members of the New Citizens Movement, a loose-knit network of activists whose dinner discussions and small-scale protests calling for official disclosure of assets have drawn the anger of the authorities in Beijing.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is in the midst of a highly publicized anti-corruption campaign, which Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has pledged will target both high-ranking “tigers” and low-level “flies” in the face of public anger over the issue.

Yet the CCP has cracked down harshly on independent activists who have the same goals, viewing organized anti-corruption protests as a challenge to its rule.

Li’s lawyer, Jiang Yuanmin (蔣援民), said that while Beijing has touted its anti-graft efforts, the activists were being targeted by Chinese authorities who wish to keep their wealth hidden from public view.

“His behavior does not constitute a crime,” he said of his client.

“People like Ding Jiaxi and Li Wei, they just want government officials to report their assets. This goes against the interests of a vast majority of officials,” he added. “So the government is afraid.”

The trial is likely to take at least two days, Jiang said, as the court was not allowing the defense to call any witnesses and Ding’s lawyer refused to answer any of the court’s questions in protest.

Ding, 46, is a well-known human rights lawyer. Li, 42, was unemployed at the time of his arrest in May last year.

A third member of the movement, Zhao Changqing (趙常青), is expected to go on trial tomorrow. Zhao was a student leader during the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square and previously served eight years in jail.

The trials come three months after a Beijing court pronounced Xu Zhiyong (許志永), a founding member of the New Citizens Movement, guilty of “gathering crowds to disrupt public order.”

The 40-year-old Xu, a prominent legal activist, was sentenced to four years in jail. Ding, Li and Zhao face similar charges, and appeared in court in January. The three men dismissed their lawyers in protest at the accusations against them, which triggered a delay to their trials.

Officers were checking IDs of passersby outside the courthouse in northwest Beijing and journalists were barred from approaching the building or lingering outside.

As the proceedings got underway, one protester yelled: “Ding Jiaxi is innocent!” before quickly being bundled off by Chinese police, according to a European diplomat who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the trial.

In an open letter published on Sunday by the human rights Web site China Change, Ding said that he had been threatened and abused by his interrogators in a process reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, China’s decade of political and cultural upheaval beginning in the mid-1960s.

“They are terrified of what we did,” Ding wrote. “They want to try us in order to warn the others. They want to tell the Chinese people, people living in China, that it is a crime to demand that officials disclose their assets.”